Locally it is called pailís éisc, which means, straightforwardly enough, fish palace. The phrase sounds grander than the structure itself, which measures roughly fifteen metres by five internally, its walls still rising to about two and a half metres despite having lost their roof entirely. What makes it quietly extraordinary is not the building's condition but its purpose: this was an industrial facility for processing fish, most likely pilchard, at the edge of the Atlantic, and it has preserved enough of its fabric to suggest how that work was actually organised.

The connection to Sir William Petty places the site in a specific and revealing moment in Irish economic history. Petty, the seventeenth-century surveyor and political economist who mapped much of Ireland for the Cromwellian settlement, is better remembered for his cartographic work than for his commercial ventures, but he operated a pilchard curing-station at this location from 1675 onwards. A fish palace, in the terminology of the period, was a facility where pilchards were pressed to extract their oil, a valuable commodity, with the compressed fish then salted and packed for export. The building that survives may be a successor to one of Petty's original presses rather than the press itself, though its relationship to that earlier operation is close enough for the old name to have stuck. The entrance in the north-east wall, framed by a segmental arch of semi-dressed stone slabs, faces the remnants of what appears to be a slipway about twenty metres away, an arrangement that makes practical sense: catches would have been landed and brought directly to the curing floor. Two flat-arched window opes in the south-east wall provided light and ventilation, and a short arched passage leads from higher ground on the north-west side down to an opening set well above the interior floor level, the function of which remains unclear. The site may also have been connected to the remains of an ancient hamlet recorded nearby in Ballinskelligs townland, suggesting a small working community gathered around the industry.